Everyone has made a joke at one time or another about having called an IT Support line and being asked or told to reboot a PC.

In a previous incarnation, and before making computers part of my daily life, I also made those calls and went through the same process.  I called, I was asked, I rebooted…and a lot of the time the problem went away.

As I went further down the path of IT support, I found my self asking that same question and giving the same advise, only to be greeted by a vast range of responses – everything from full compliance followed by a “thank you for fixing the problem”, to outright lies about having rebooted the computer just before calling and the reboot not having addressed the issue.

Fast forward through 17 odd years of delivering IT support and I’m prepared to put it in writing…Go on, reboot!! and do it OFTEN!!!

The reasons for this piece of advice, which I am sure you have been given umpteen times before is simple.  The process of troubleshooting anything is basically a process of elimination, and the fastest way of eliminating a whole lot of unknowns, is to start from scratch, and the only way to start from scratch, is to start working on a PC which has just been rebooted.  So it really is that simple.  You are simply being asked to put the PC into a state which is a relative known, vs. a state which is a relative unknown.  The word “relative” here simply relates to the fact that all PCs are not equal and each has a slightly different configuration depending on its use.

Specifically with Retail Pro in mind, the process of rebooting may address a number of issues in Windows that affect Retail Pro adversely, but which have nothing to do with Retail Pro.  Hence, when you try to process a transaction and something strange happens, the first instinct is to point the finger at Retail Pro because it is not processing the transaction.  However, if an underlying subsystem has failed and Retail Pro needs for this subsystem to be operational, the issue will manifest itself in Retail Pro though it is being caused by something outside of Retail Pro.  A similar issue arises with programs like Microsoft Excel – if you have a corrupt spreadsheet, opening it up in Excel may cause the program to crash.  At first sight it looks like there’s something wrong with Excel, but in fact the issue is with the spreadsheet.  Fixing the spreadsheet magically fixes Excel.

Given that a point of sale PC is often used by a number of people for a number of reasons unrelated to transacting sales (though I know no-one ever uses them for non-business purposes like web browsing, personal emailing, Facebook, Bebo, checking out TradeMe, playing on-line games, looking for work etc.), a reboot is a quick, simple, painless, and very effective way of making a whole lot of problems go away.

Now, ask someone else delivering IT support and they will say I’m giving you bad advice because rebooting masks any problems inherent in the software which are caused by poor software development practices and bugs.  To that I say maybe, and advise they keep in mind the following:

1. You already own the hardware and the software and unless the entire system is totally dead, a reboot is a lot faster, practical, and cheaper than system heart surgery.
2. Why peel a grape with an axe? Diagnosing hardware and software problems of a certain nature is almost impossible outside of a lab environment where you can control everything that goes on.  If the reboot fixes it, and the problem doesn’t appear again immediately why look further?  Put another way, simplicity works – ask Einstein!
3. Everyone “reboots” everything they deal with on a daily basis just about daily.  You don’t start your car, drive it somewhere and leave it running for three months while you go off and do something.  You don’t watch the news at 6pm and leave the TV on until tomorrow at 6pm because you’ll need to turn it on again then.  Better yet, try not sleeping for three days and see how you cope.
4. Reboots don’t just take care of system created problems, but of people created problems.  You will never have 100% knowledge of the use a system has gotten from a given end user, hence you cannot tell how that use has and will affect the operation of the system.  Of course, no-one ever touches anything and things just happen – but that’s a blog posting on other topics.

I mentioned above about having been told outright lies regarding a PC having been rebooted prior to calling our helpdesk.  The reason I know this is simple – THE COMPUTER KEEPS TRACK OF WHEN IT WAS LAST RESTARTED AND WE CAN GET IT TO TELL US THIS INFORMATION.  For those of you with a curios mind, simply open up a command prompt, (click on Start -> Run… -> type cmd then press “Enter”) and in the box that appears type “net statistics workstation” (without the “”) and press “Enter”.  Now scroll to the top of the window and you will see a line that reads “Statistics since” followed by a date and a time.  If today’s date is not displayed there, you have not rebooted today!!

In case you are curious, I never reboot my netbook until the thing simply says ENOUGH!, at which point I take the advice I have just given you.  This way of running your system is also OK, by the way. The thing is to be sure that you understand the pitfalls of not rebooting regularly and that you accept responsibility for this.